In the past I have had problems with getting wireless working on Linux laptops. I thought this had been fixed with more recent distributions, but in some rare circumstances there can be problems.

In this case I have an old laptop that I have set-up for my son to use. It's ancient compared with current hardware, but is still able to run a less demanding distribution such as Xubuntu. It installed OK with and older version of Xubuntu, but with 11.10 it said "Requires Firmware".

Checking it's a Broadcom mini-wireless card

The first step is to identify what wireless chipset is installed. In my case a Dell mini-pci wireless card, which uses the Broadcom chipset. To check this run the lspci command from a terminal: